EPISODE 231 Feministing In The Kitchen

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Cookbooks can be incredibly powerful tools for both examining women’s history and empowering women through the art of cooking. So then why, in 2015, is there still this notion that the home and the kitchen is only a place for an oppressed woman? In the emerging field of feminist food studies, which has really started to come up within the past 20 years, scholars analyze cookbooks, food writing, and recipes to observe women’s history by looking at the way women lived their daily lives. In the book “From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies,” Barbara Haber and Arlene Vaski Avakian say that “studying the most banal of human activities can yield crucial information and insights about both daily life and worldview, from what is in the pot to the significance of what’s cooking it.” Feminist food studies looks at history through the everyday tasks performed by everyday women.